3 monitors + USB3 External Monitor adapter + Yosemite

[luckman212]

Hi all,
I've got a late 2012 mini with (3) 1080p monitors hooked up. 10.10 dp7.
hdmi port > monitor 1
thunderbolt-dvi adapter > monitor 2
plugable usb3-dvi adapter > monitor 3

All works "ok" but the video on the usb3 adapter is horribly laggy and causes major cpu usage spikes. I have the latest 2.2 driver from here installed. I was just wondering if anyone else has the same type of setup and figured out how to get performance up to par. With USB3 I thought the performance would be much better, closer to Thunderbolt since usb3 is 5gb/s.

 

[iPhil]

Could be the developer hasn't update the usb3 driver to Yosemite is causing the cpu spiking ...

2.2 update is "listed" for 10.6 to 10.9 no 10.10 update yet ..

OS: Mavericks 10.9, Mountain Lion 10.8, Lion 10.7, Snow Leopard 10.6 update 2.2 is from June 10,2014 ( 8 days after WWDC 14 keynote address - thought 2.2 would work on Yosemite)

 

[luckman212]

I forgot to mention in my OP that I originally tried it on 10.9 -- performance was the same (maybe even slightly worse) so I decided to try the 10.10 beta hoping that Apple had fixed things from their end. Sadly it seems they haven't. I hope that between Apple + DisplayLink they can sort this out. Performance is equal to the USB2.0 solutions I've seen, nowhere near to what is could be/should be.

 

[fhall1]

Good luck with a Displaylink adapter.....mine hasn't worked right since Snow Leopard. I finally put it in a drawer - life is too short to spend days trying to get that stupid adapter to work right after every time Apple releases a point update to OS X.

 

[Craftypenguin]

I've been holding off on updating OS X until the DisplayLink issues were ironed out, but decided to give it a whirl by installing Yosemite on an external drive.

Lo and behold, using the DisplayLink 2.3 Beta driver and a Kensington SD3500v USB 3.0 universal dock I'm able to run (2) Dell 24" 2407WFP displays at 1920x1200 resolution, with one connected via the dock's DVI port, and the other to the dock's HDMI port via a DVI-to-HDMI cable; and (1) 22" Acer AL2216W display at 1680x1050 resolution via a VGA-to-Mini DisplayPort adapter.

Thus far, the lag has been about what I was experiencing on 10.8.5 - not unusable, but definitely not silky smooth.

I haven't rebooted, or disconnected the DisplayLink dock yet, so I'm not sure if the display order will stay in place, but even if I have to rearrange my displays, I will take comfort in the fact that I'm able to run three external displays off my mid-2012 MBA.

Likely speaking too soon on the reordering bit... I'll probably hate it within a day or two, but right now I'm excited that I can upgrade to 10.10.

Edit: I suppose I should add that my 13" MBA is a 1.8 GHz i5 with 8GB RAM, and Intel HD4000 integrated graphics.